Trabocchi Reinvents Porchetta at FiammaFabio Trabocchi gained fame, and a James Beard award, for his modern Italian food at Maestro in Virginia. Now, he’s Michael White’s replacement at Fiamma, and his contemporary take on porchetta, the most intensely rural and down-market of dishes, is a fair example of Trabocchi’s style: “In Italy, porchetta is a pig on a spit with wild fennel. It’s either boned and stuffed in a meat-loaf shape or opened up, like a book, on a spit. It’s something we tried to reinvent with a modern version without losing the original flavors.” As always, mouse over the different elements to see them described in the chef’s own words.
User’s Guide
Grub’s Gold: The Best From Year One
Ah, how time gets away from us! It was only one year ago that Grub Street began. How we long for those innocent days of yore! We poked through our archives, and, while we had to put a few personal favorites aside, here’s our short list of Grub Street’s Greatest Hits.
Neighborhood Watch
Vive Les Classiques at Payard on the UES; Snorting Not a Problem at the WaverlyDumbo: Pie Social! This Sunday at Bubby’s! Noon to 3 p.m. [Dumbo NYC]
East Village: Mo Pitkin’s gives up the ghost October 20. [Eater]
Greenwich Village: One of the best places to get risotto in the city is … surprise! Risotteria. [amNY]
Meatpacking District: The first rule of Clubland: “You must bring something to the party … Good looks, money, personality, or women.” [NYDN]
Upper East Side: Payard chef Philippe Bertineau is resurrecting classics like bouillabaisse and crispy pig’s feet for the restaurant’s tenth anniversary. [Restaurant Girl]
West Village: A Radar mole tests the cocaine limits of popular nightspots and “here he is at Vanity Fair editor Graydon Carter’s Waverly Inn, where it is apparently completely okay to get your snort on.” [Radar via Gawker]
NewsFeed
A New Sofrito, Somewhere in ManhattanJimmy Rodriguez, the man behind the late, legendary Jimmy’s Bronx Café wants to open an outpost of his midtown joint Sofrito — same concept, same Puerto Rican menu. “I’m looking all over the city for something next year,” he tells us. He has considered a former club space in Chelsea, but he’s still open to anything below 96th Street.
Foodievents
Mega Food Weekend Takes Over Pier 94Culinary events in New York are getting bigger all the time, and now comes word of a behemoth so immense that it’s going to require all of Pier 94. Cook. Eat. Drink. Live., to be held October 26-27th, will be a kind of vast, sprawling combination of a giant trade show (think the Fancy Food Show) as well as a giant dining event (à la Taste of New York), adding in fifteen cooking classes a day, five wine-tasting classes, and five mixology classes too, all with the likes of Will Goldfarb, Ilan Hall, Josh DeChellis, and Paul Liebrandt. Normally, this orgy of A-list epicureanism would cost $325 a day, but buy tickets with the NYMAG code for a reduced rate of $175 a day or $350 for the weekend, including all demos.
Cook. Eat. Drink. Live [Official Site]
Mediavore
O’Reilly on Defense Over Sylvia’s; Osso Buco Owner Won’t Take Clinton DownBill O’Reilly says his comments at Sylvia’s were “cherry-picked” from a conversation about racial stereotypes. [AP]
Nino “thousand-dollar-pizza” Selimaj tells the Post that he won’t take down a photo taken of him with Chelsea Clinton from one of his restaurants even though Bill Clinton’s lawyer wants him to since that would set a bad precedent for the other photos he’s taken with boldfaced names: “We have Derek Jeter, we have Regis Philbin, we have Rudolph Giuliani, Danny Glover, Mariah Carey [and] Sopranos [castmates].” [NYP]
Related: We Try a $1,000 Pizza, Maintain That We Aren’t Publicity Tools
Tom Colicchio takes over Top Chef blogging duties from Bourdain and trades caustic commentary for a more scientific synopsis of what the contestants did wrong. [Tom’s Blog/Bravo]
NewsFeed
Josh DeChellis Brings Special Beer and More Special Foods to BarFryWhen Josh DeChellis opened up BarFry, we were a little skeptical. It seems a waste of the chef’s prodigal talent to just be throwing stuff into a pot of oil, which is pretty much what we imagine tempura cooking to be. Well, not to worry. Like he did at Sumile Sushi, DeChellis is breaking out his brilliant composed dishes.
Market Table Already Bumpin’ Market Table has opened for both lunch and dinner with little fanfare, and what we hear today predicts future success. Chef-owner Joey Campanero tells us that he did two and a half turns at lunch today (roughly 100 customers). Plus, the retail counter is cha-chinging away. The biggest seller, Campanero says, is the burger. No surprise, given that it’s made from the same magic meat found in burgers at the Spotted Pig, Stand, Borough Food and Drink, City Hall, and even (though not exactly) the Shake Shack. Expect a tough table: the place is even smaller than the Little Owl, Campanero ’s perpetually packed West Village favorite.
Related: Shop Like a Chef (Preferably in His Own Store)
Back of the House
Ov-er-ra-ted! (Clap-Clap-ClapClapClap)
The Post returned to an evergreen feature idea today, every editor’s best friend: the “overrated” list. Since our philosophy has always been to slavishly ape the Post in every way short of peppering our posts with the phrase “tot-slay suspect,” we thought we might add a few of our own. Since the Post didn’t limit itself to specific dishes at specific restaurants, we won’t either. Here are a few things that we find ourselves less than overawed with these days.
Neighborhood Watch
Primehouse Opening in Flatiron; Trabocchi Siphoned Former Staff to SohoCarroll Gardens: New wine bar Black Mountain Wine House on Union Street is filled to the brim with lovely sipping ladies. [Eat for Victory/VV]
Flatiron: Diddy has closed Justin’s because it’s not big enough. [NYP] Stephen Hanson’s steakhouse, Primehouse, opens Monday. [Zagat]
Harlem: Fall registration is open for free proper-dining lessons at “New York City’s only tuition-free etiquette school for children,” the Development and Finishing Institute. [Uptown Flavor]
Soho: New Fiamma chef Fabio Trabocchi “brought with him 12 members of the staff of Maestro, in McLean, Va., his previous employer” in order to ease his New York transition. [NYT]
Upper East Side: David Burke’s Hudson Valley Foie Gras ‘PB&J’ Tourchon is pushing it. [NYO]
Williamsburg: The best way to be sure your beef is prime is to eat at a top steakhouse, and lucky for you, according to “Amy Rubenstein, whose family owns Peter Luger, the shortage is over.” [NYP]
NewsFeed
Ramsay Now an Expert on Lox and Bagels, TooThey say that if you abuse somebody enough, it means that you secretly love them. But in the case of Gordon Ramsay, the man’s insufferable ego, vituperation, bombast, and general skeeviness have somehow made him almost admirable to us. (We say nothing of his food, which neither we nor anyone we know has ever eaten.) But with his latest act of effrontery, Ramsay has gone beyond the beyonds. We now have to either destroy him or marry him, because last night the Surly Scotchman actually presumed, on national television, to teach Larry King how to schmear a bagel.
NewsFeed
Metromix Asks a Street VendorFood-blog newcomer Metromix takes it to the street today to interview the Vendy Award nominees in anticipation of the ceremony on Saturday. Even if the Q&As don’t plumb quite as deep into the world of food carts as did New York’s Street Fare package, we get some interesting tidbits: Veronica Julien of Veronica’s Kitchen — who is scouting downtown Manhattan for a restaurant location — rises at 3 a.m. to stew oxtail for three hours, and Muhammed Rahman of Kwik Meal awakens at a schoolgirlish 6 a.m. Word from NY Dosas, the King of Falafel and Shawarma, and Super Tacos, too.
Street Meet [Metromix NY]
Related:
Street Fare [NYM]
